Bits Roy Taylor on game physics, AI & piracy

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2008/09/25/roy-taylor-on-physics-ai-making-games-fun/1

We managed to catch up with Roy Taylor, Nvidia's vice president of content relations and head of the marketing sub-committee for the PC Gaming Alliance, to talk about some of the challenges PC gaming faces over the next few years.

 

Revinue from other avenues can be a tricky thing to get right, different things work better in different situations. Unfortunately I suspect that a lot of marketing people who are concerned with seeing their product/brand in game are only going to be concerned with how much screentime or how large the poster is regardless of how this impacts on the look and feel of the game it is being seen in.

Posters and billboards work gret in racing or other sports games simply because that is where they are naturally seen in the afk (real) world. However plastering huge posters and the like along the corridors of an alien base or in an apartment would just look absurd regardless of how much revinue they would bring in. This is where product placement has the edge. I look around my desk now and I see a bottle of Diet Coke, an iPod Touch, a Nokia phone, an HP monitor and a Dell Monitor all big brands and all commonly seen.

If your character was to go into a lab or office block and see these things there then they would be recognisable and a source of great advertising for the companies in question.

One can only hope that these things are all kept in proportion...........

 

Love to see all the new "stuff" getting into games. Cant wait to see and play it!

 

I just downloaded that AISeek tank battle demo. Looks really good.

 

Backbreaker is also well-worth checking out, even if you're not into American Football/sports games in general.

 

excellent interview, i'm glad that someone in PCGA is doing something, unlike them d***s from epic

 

Yeah, Id and Epic whine now because they have long since lost ther place as a top PC dev by making average games, so what do the arrogant fooks do? They say PC gaming is dieing and go to consoles where average crap like Force unleashed and Creed sells like hot cakes. They take the easy way out where they don't have to work as hard on quality to get good sales.

 

I think he inadvertently made the point that Tim was trying to ask about. This is the line of reasoning that brought us Doom3 and Crysis and so amny others. Granted, he workd for nVidia and not a developer, but to me this shows an inherent lack of understanding of what makes a great game.

Also glad to see that someone understands that the present model of software ownership and it's effects on piracy.

 

After just completing(better late than never) HalfLife 2 Episode 2, I can certainly relate to Roys statement about physics being key to gameplay. AI should not be underestimated though. We don't want another rainbow six lockdown.
Good interview Tim, always nice to hear the latest and greatest coming out of the Nvidia stables.

 

the demos from natural motion were very interesting, I played thru gta4 can't remember anything interesting about the physics, but it did seem polished when you hit pedestrians

 

vehicle physics? the suspension on the cars.

perhaps the best game to integrate physics into gameplay in such a sublime way has got to be half life 2. other games seemed to have physics integrated just for the sake of it.
nowadays you need good physics to get away with it. no longer can you just tack on any old rag doll physics for bodies and get
away with it. they gotta slump and react properly. gears of war is a game that sticks out the most in my mind when it comes to this (crappy rag doll physics). you kill massive locusts but their bodies flop around as if they lack bones and slide weightlessly.

 

Greetings!

From the article:

I like that guy.

 

i think he was trying to say that any improvement in physics results in an improvement in gameplay, not that physics is the be-all and end-all of gameplay
thats how i understood it anyway
kinda makes sense, take crysis for example, physics enabling you to destroy buildings entirely added to the gameplay immensely

 

yes, that's the point he was trying to make... I was arguing that physics might be added just for the sake of making the game look pretty and it'd turn in to an annoyance/gimmick.

 

Quote:
With regards to piracy, first of all, you can’t make the good guys, i.e. the legitimate purchasing customers, feel like they’re criminals and one of the issues right now with existing DRM methodologies or processes is that they can sometimes make the good guy feel like they’re not valued.

Battle Field 2142 pretty much drew the line for my pc gaming, punkbuster till this day kicks me from everysingle game I try to join and EA refuses to help me, **** them!